The PS3 suddenly became an interesting product again:-) Now lets give us some benchmarks of some scientific number crunching apps!

Not to me. Sony is at war with its customers; that's been evident since XCP. Hell, I felt dirty buying a broken Sony stereo for ten bucks, even though Sony didn't profit from my purchase.

How do you know the PS3s don't have hardware rootkits? I know of no other company that's deliberately installed malware on its products. I avoid Sony like the plague and can't understand why anyone would buy anything from them, or how it's has stayed in business, let alone how it can actually have fanbois.

To be fair the options we have are:Sony: Evil, and incompetent.Microsoft: Evil and you get to pay for premium "internet access" for your games.Nintendo: Ugly + ShovelwarePC: Rootkit your computer to play games.Not games: Heh. Right.

Actually I am against DRM but Steam is actually ok. It runs in offline mode so I don't need to be connected, it runs on any number of computers which is again useful for me and I can access my games anywhere. It pains me to say it but steam imho is DRM done right. Don't get me wrong it isn't really effective as DRM as there are cracks out there but it is not (as) intrusive as anything else.

The only thing they could do to be better is bring in a market place to let people sell used games. Valve take a cut

The 360 wasn't an option because the crime cartel that created it will not get my dollar.

I don't get it. Yes, MS is a dirty company, but Sony makes MS look like Mother Theresa. Almost all of MS's victims were their competetitors, almost all Sony's victims were their customers. I avoid MS products because I simply don't like most of them.

If I'd done to Sony's computers what they did to mine, I'd be in prison (my then-teenaged daughter worked in a record store and deliberately installed the software, never dreaming that a big, reputable company would ruin her dad's PC).

One might consider that the rootkit was only possible because Microsoft's OS was insecure

MS is insecure, true, but if you can convince a user to install your program with root priveleges, you can pwn any OS. Like I said, I had autoplay shut off, but my daughter trusted Sony. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Microsoft shipped a virus on their OS install disk but you give that a pass. They pushed a patch that changed their OS to allow a single, specially crafted image on a website to root your machine to help Federal law enforcement to install spy software on PCs.

I hadn't heard of that one, would like to read about it and would appreciiate a link. Was the virus deliberate, or a stupid oversight?

Does you altruism keep you from running Windows?

It's not altruism, it's mistrust. And no, I have no Microsoft software at home (I'm forced to use their crappy software at work, though). I run kubuntu. When I bought a netbook last year, Windows was only on it long enough for me to figure out how to install Linux without a CD drive.

The last MS OS I bought was XP (right after Sony rooted me and I couldn't get win 98 drivers for my sound and video cards), and the worst thing it did to me was to replace a perfectly good network driver with one that didn't work at all. But that was incompetence rather than evil.

I got tired of chasing the dragon about the time the game companies all started treating their customers like crap, and just stopped gaming.

Someone should submit a/. story "Who's more evil, Sony or Microsoft?" I would posit that MS is incompetent and/or don't care (they don't have to with their virtual monopoly), while Sony deliberately commits evil against its paying customers time and time again.

I would imagine that Sony's console probably is a better made console than Microsoft's, but I have little experience with either (I think my nephew has both).

I don't feel I have the moral high ground; I use AT&T for internet access, and that makes me feel dirty, but Comcast is my only other choice and they're as evil and more expensive.

We just had a respectful, rational discussion. I read your response and better understand your point of view than I did before. We were both polite and earnest in our communication. I pleasantly feel as if I have stepped through the looking glass.

can't understand why anyone would buy anything from them, or how it's has stayed in business, let alone how it can actually have fanbois.

Looking at them solely from the PS3 angle, several reasons:

(1) People buy the console because it plays the games they are interested in (particularly games exclusive for the console).(2) People in general don't care about OtherOS support as most people won't need the functionality, and so doesn't factor into their decision making.(3) If you spend a lot of money on ANYTHING

Sounds right. Until you think again. There was a second rootkit with the microvault thumb drive and they were another division as well. (Why do people keep forgetting this one?) Then the subpoenas of people who visited a web site, or watched a video, which was still yet another division. Sony sees the customer as the enemy. I do not want to do business with my enemy.

Sorry, but the website demographics thing was justified, the courts even said so. It's no different then demanding to see a business client information so you can see if they are selling things somewhere they aren't suppose to. They didn't get any other information, and they weren't planning on suing any of the viewers.

Then the subpoenas of people who visited a web site, or watched a video, which was still yet another division.

Which 1) weren't turned over to Sony itself and 2) only used to argue jurisdiction. It's disingenuous to use the action out of context to imply nefarious intent.

Sony's done enough on its own to make certain segments of the population upset, and with good reason. There's no need to make stuff up.

No making stuff up involved. Sony did ask for it, and the court limited it. But Sony did ask... And it was only used to argue jurisdiction because they didn't get the data. If the would have received all of the data, they might or might not have used it. I am guessing they would based on past performance, but it is still a guess. You are ascribing limitations set by the court as altruism, which ain't the case.

Eh. For me - still running an early version PS3 - this doesn't do anything yet.

I'd love to install it, really I would. This + Linux XBMC would make the PS3 into an awesome media device. (And no, "just install a upnp server" is not an option - upnp servers are crap, require you to leave a box rather than just a network storage device running, and don't allow for anything approaching quick fast-forward/rewind or turning subtitles on/off or switching language tracks).

Yep, uPNP sucks. Even just playing back from media on the device sucks, the browser is awful. It's not so bad when using attached storage with your own folder structure, but still not great.

I've switched to mostly using Spotify for music now, though there is no PS3 client. There is a LoveFilm streaming client on PS3, which caused me to start a LoveFilm subscription, but I haven't even been able to access that with the recent PSN outage and switched to using my Xoom instead now that it's got full Flash 10.2.

You wouldn't think people were blowing the CD rootkit out of proportion if you'd been a victim of it. I don't see where it being a different branch has anything to do with it; it's the same CEO and same board of directors. As much as Microsoft has pissed me off over the years, I'd still consider an Xbox if I were looking for a game console, although I'd probably get a Wii. My only complaint about MS is (with the exception of Excel) that their code and design are crappy.

They replaced GroupWise with Outlook where I work last year, and I hate it. So does everybody I work with. Useful features in GroupWise just aren't there with Outlook, it's a PIA to use (you have to go to a web site to change your password!), and there's no added functionality or additional features that I've found.

I hate spreadsheets in general, but I dislike Excel the least (I have to use Excel, Quattro, and Lotus at work).

I had a Microsoft mouse ten or fifteen years ago. It was a good mouse, but I wasn't

What OS and email server do they use at your work? In our setup, Outlook/Exchange just use standard Windows NTLM authentication, so to change your password you just change your domain password (ctrl-alt-delete, Change Password).

Well, I like Exchange because of the DirectPUSH functionality which means our employees can get their mail immediately on WinMobile/iOS/Android, no need for a CrackBerry (RIM make awful, awful software). Unfortunately I haven't yet found a Linux email client that works reliably with

blow the CD rootkit thing out of proportion in relation to the PS3 considering it was a different branch of Sony

I'm sorry, but "different branch of Sony" is still Sony, especially if it has "Sony" in the name. Now, if Sony the Parent Company had publicly apologized, and fixed the problem but no, Sony released a supposed fix for the rootkit that made things even worse.

In fact, Sony has proven again and again that they want people to buy their products, but ${DEITY} help the customers if they truly start gett

I've already lost functionality (OtherOS) and had my CC number potentially compromised (I just cancelled it and had a new one sent out). I already have my PS3 though so I'm not going to do anything about it right now. With the OtherOS thing, they were just trying to (foolishly) protect themselves from GeoHot, and them being hacked is hardly malicious either. I will suck it up as long as I feel that the benefits of their hardware and games outweigh the negatives of their bumbling. Sony make great hardware, b

The PS3 suddenly became an interesting product again:-) Now lets give us some benchmarks of some scientific number crunching apps!

How does having access to the 8 CELL cores make the PS/3 a "supercomputer"?

Also, what do you think the possibility of running Fortran or some version of C++ and Fast Fourier Transforms on this thing would be? My wife's trying to do these shallow water solitary wave simulations and we've been using HP xw9300 workstations and it's taking frigging forever. I'm not joking. She's

The only way a PS3 is a "supercomputer" is if it's one of a few thousand hooked together.

On a halfway serious note -- is her work something that could benefit from the simulations being re-written to take advantage of graphics cards, using NVIDIA's CUDA or whatever the ATI equivalent is? In some ways, it's astonishing how much computing power we devote to drawing triangles and putting pictures on them, so if her simulation can be written to take advantage of that power you might see a pretty good jump in p

By networking 8 ps3's together (64 cell cores) you have enough processing power to model a black hole. A scientist was the one who pioneered the system as a replacement for expensive rent on super computer time. I would of given it a go but right about the time 2nd hand ps3 got cheap, Sony disabled the other os option.

How does having access to the 8 CELL cores make the PS/3 a "supercomputer"?

Well the definition of "supercomputer" changes over time obviously, but I imagine you don't have to go too far back in time for a PS3 to qualify. The fact that I have one in my living room counts for a lot.

For the types of thing that cells are good at, probably nothing even comes close to the installed cost (cycles/sec/$) of a pile of PS3s.

Is that not what most of the people who use the hacks he described do? He opened the door to mass piracy on the platform, that's undeniable. Without his hacks, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in currently.

“We discovered a file [newstechnica.com] making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”

[...]including all 8 CELL cores (making the PS3 the world's most affordable supercomputer).

I'm not sure I'd call a PS3 a supercomputer. If you clustered a bunch of them it might qualify but even so there are plenty of rendering and computation clusters out there that could easily beat a cluster of several dozen PS3's without their owners thinking of them as "supercomputers".

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned but to me a supercomputer is something that cost millions of dollars to build and is capable of crunching numbers on a scale that a run-of-the-mill computer is incapable of (and yes, this of course assumes that the run-of-the-mill computer and the supercomputer are of the same era, to compare a Cray from the early '80s with a modern octo-core server with 64+ GiB of RAM wouldn't be fair).

Why do you assume they lost access. The firmware updates only affected PS3 users who used OtherOS and PSN. I doubt any super computer clusters which had used the PS3 were affected by the change because they wouldn't be updating their firmware anyway.

They might not have lost access, but the 'old times' OtherOS option in the PS3 still hid part of the hardware. I'm sure that if you google for it you'll find plenty of technical details. As far as I remember it, the OtherOS (linux) ran on a hypervisor that did shielded it from the GPU and at least one core.The USAF apparently linked a LOT (1760?) of these PS3's together and use it as a super-computer. If they can unlock that extra core on each machine, they'll gain quite a bit of extra computer power !

You didn't have access to one CPU. You had access to the CPU and 6 SPUs. The only major thing that was "nerfed" was the graphics driver which was adequate for 2D but not up for much beyond that. I doubt that restriction would have meant much to supercomputers either where it was unlikely any of the nodes were even plugged into a display.

Right now, the best bang per buck in parallel computing seems to be found in GPUs. For the price of a PS3 you can buy a few TFLOPS of processing power. For one thing, the PS3 was launched in 2006, so it is hard to compete against modern GPUs. However, the Cell is an interesting piece of hardware in other ways, at least for tinkerers who want something else than a beige x86 box.

I agree with everything you said, but keep in mind that the two processors (Cell,GPU) are architecturally very different. They both lend themselves to very different models of computation, and thus solving different problem sets. Each will excel above the other if pointed at the right problem set for its given design.

You can buy a dual core graphics card which has around 5 Tflops but the PS3 does not come near that. PS3 is also 8 specialized cores in a more efficient package though. If AMD or Nvidia decided to make card purely for FLOPS it'd beat any other technology designed for computational power by a large margin.

*Use a PC for linux and not the PS3*
Why must I spend £300 for a console for games and £300 for a PC to use? can I not just spend £300 and have both?

In response to someone saying "if hacker's only want homebrew then there is nothing wrong with that" this was posted:
*And can you really trust them with those responsibilities?*
Sadly noone responded to that with "you trusted sony with your credit card details"

Looks like that thread [n4g.com] was started by one of the new Sony troll accounts. Take a look at Kayla [n4g.com]:

OtherOS since it gives you full access to the machine, no more being tied down by Sony.How the @#$@ are we tied down by Sony?

The account was registered just when PSN went down and they have posted nothing other than posts defending Sony. No other posts, no PS3 gamer tag. I bet there are others, but this one is the most obvious.

1. Is it currently possible to run games (hacked or otherwise) from Linux once your PS3 has booted Linux? Or do you have to reboot the console into the game directly?

2. How practical is it to hack a PS3 game in the first place and how many games are known to have been hacked with cheats such as aimbots? I was under the impression that when running games on the PS3, more-or-less everything had to be signed.

1) It's NOT POSSIBLE (and never has been) to run PS3 games from Linux on the PS3. All the games are encrypted and such so that they can only be run from GameOS. This new Linux method has more access than ever, but I believe it's still impossible to play games outside of OtherOS.

2) There has been game hacks and cheat devices released, but they're not that prevalent any more. You're correct that everything needs to be signed, but as we have the private keys from frimware OS 3.41 and earlier,

1) The danger that Linux posed was it was an attack vector. If Sony had left OtherOS there after it was compromised it would have developed into an easy to deploy crack that people could simply download and run. The only time they'd be using Linux would be to crack the hypervisor before installing custom firmware. After the reboot they'd be running a modded GameOS and could discard the OtherOS partition completely.

2) Well once you have modded firmware you can mod / patch any game you like. Write code that

OtherOS was removed _before_ GeoHot started hacking around the limitations. Sony was losing money in the beginning on every PS3 sold so they sought to lessen the losses and cut back on the OtherOS function so that they wouldn't need to spend money on that. Also, the OtherOS class action suit revealed that e.g. IBM pressured Sony to do this, too, because IBM was trying to sell Cell as the server CPU but Sony was selling it way cheaper than IBM did.

Some of what they said what accurate, but only mixed with half truths and closed minded thinking. Not all PS3 hackers want access to the RSX to "pirate games". I'd love to be able to use my PS3 as a PS2 emulator for example, with otherOS++ I suspect this may be possible now. I have PS2 discs that I bought legally. However I can't be assed installing non-authorised ROMs because I actually like having access to PSN (not that I've had any for the last couple of weeks anyway.

No, he did "do some shit" to access the hypervisor from OtherOS, that's what prompted Sony to remove it. But that was a big mistake as we saw, as it just encourage a lot more hackers to work on other ways to crack the PS3.

Go and check your facts. Geohot produced a viable attack against the hypervisor which used OtherOS as the attack vector. Sony was hardly likely to sit idly by while the attack evolved into a download, burn & run iso which rooted a PS3 and used it to install custom firmware. So it is correct to say if he hadn't used OtherOS to attack the hypervisor that OtherOS would still exist today.

Why don't you check YOUR facts?Sony had already released the PS3 Slims WITHOUT OtherOS support when Geohot decided to take a look. Sure, he used OtherOS as the attack vector, but surely that just points out that removing OtherOS wouldn't accomplish anything as the hackers can just not update and continue exploring?

Furthermore, the actual "hack" was nontrivial - it invovled a bit of soldering and require precise timing. Because of this, it wasn't easy to pull off and worked maybe 1/3 of the time. Not only that, but it wasn't even remotely permanent and it couldn't be used for piracy or anything. In fact, interest in this hack was more or less gone by the time OtherOS was removed, if Sony had just ignored it until there was actually an issue, then it would have just went away. But then again, Maybe Sony realised how weak their security was.

Seriously, "the world's most affordable supercomputer" what drivel is this?

Last time I checked, having 8 multi-purpose cores did not a super computer make.

I'll grant that the PS3 is an affordable supercomputer component, but it's no more "super" than my rack of 8 core servers -- In fact, in terms of flops it's no where close to my server rack's combined processing power...

Considering that the PS3 is only a possible component in a super computer, and the fact that there are many cheaper components with which to build a super (cluster) computer I call bullshit on both "world's most affordable" and "supercomputer" claims -- That is, unless the PS3 now comes with dual identities, one of which is a crime fighting vigilante by night...

Last time I checked, having 8 multi-purpose cores did not a super computer make.

Last time I checked, structuring your sentence in an old-timey way does not a better point make.

Damn, nice burn man, my point is totally irrelevant now thanks to your pointing out of the sentence structure which could be improved. I suppose using not one but two ellipses completely obliterated any worth my statements might have held...

Seriously, calling devices "supercomputers" reeks of either fanboyism or extreme ignorance. If a desktop device can do a given amount of calculations, that amount of calculations don't make something a supercomputer anymore.

Please remember that the first supercomputer, the Cray-1, did 250 MFLOPS. So if that is what it takes to be a supercomputer then my cellphone qualifies. Of course it doesn't anymore, these days you need to talk multiple TFLOPS (or more).

A PS3 is not a supercomputer. In fact these days, it isn't all that impressive. The best they claim is 25.6 GFLOPS per cell in theoretical performance, so 205 GFLOPS is the best you theoretically get, if there are no bandwidth constraints (which there are on a PS3) for single precision math. Ok well testing my actual Radeon 5870, I get 800 GFLOPS for single precision, 227 for double precision. That is an actual benchmark of the card running on my desktop. It also can handle a much larger problem set, having much more RAM (1GB on the card).

Heck even my i7 benches at 80 GFLOPS on a real test, without using AVX, and of course is far more flexible than the SPUs since all cores are full featured.

Not saying there is anything wrong with the Cell and indeed there may be some cases where it is the best choice. It is something of a hybrid between a pure stream processor like a GPU and a very general CPU like an i7. However trying to claim it makes the PS3 a "supercomputer" is stupid. Even if it were the most powerful chip out there, the PS3 still would be a supercomputer by virtue of the fact that if one made a large computer with a lot of Cells, it would be much faster (this has been done).

However that aside, it really isn't all that fast. Modern GPUs out do it at stream processing many times over. My 5870, which is not the latest tech and just a consumer card, was about 4 times as fast in reality as a Cell is in theory, and that is running on a desktop system doing other things (I didn't boot to a special graphics benchmark or anything).

I'm reminded of when Apple called Altivec capable CPUs "supercomputers." My brain wants to eat itself so it can forget such silliness.

(if Apple does this again I'm still going to be an apple fanboi, but i will face palm on the way into the Apple store.)

Except that it wasn't Apple, but the US Government. Apple just used it in commercials. The G4 (PowerPC 7400) was capable of a gigaflop, and it was this that placed it in a category where US export policy considered it a supercomputer, making it illegal to export.

When the PS3 was announced, wasn't it said that if it had been made 5 years earlier, it would have gone into the top 100 supercomputer list? I think that's what the summary is talking about - more a nickname from the past than an actual assessment of the performance now against todays supercomputers.

If the word "supercomputer" wasn't there, the article wouldn't be modded up.
The point of the post is otherOS++. It's great to get the capability to run linux again AND be able to go online, frag some friends and get all your personal information stolen.
Supercomputer, probably not, super cool hack, for sure!

So you compare a general purpose processor to a specialist processor and think it is poor (Cell to Radeon)

But compare the Cell to an i7 and no comment... the Cell leaves an i7 looking a very slow CPU...

That fact that it does not outperform a modern GPU (specialist processor) is irrelevant, I can buy a complete PS3 for £250 and is it something that can outperform an i7 (currently worth ~ £200 for just the processor)

You might be forgetting that the Cell was released in 2006. The multi-core CPUs from Intel today are only just now starting to reach the peak theoretical performance than the Cell. Also, your Radeon was released when? 2009? Given Moore's law (which is still in effect for parallel architectures like Cell and GPUs), the factor by which your Radeon beats the Cell isn't too bad. Also note that the compute performance of an I/O device like a GPU can be limited by the I/O bus; both in terms of bandwidth and

The best they claim is 25.6 GFLOPS per cell in theoretical performance, so 205 GFLOPS is the best you theoretically get, if there are no bandwidth constraints (which there are on a PS3) for single precision math. Ok well testing my actual Radeon 5870, I get 800 GFLOPS for single precision, 227 for double precision. That is an actual benchmark of the card running on my desktop.

As somebody who programmed Cell CPUs for signal processing (including to, but not limited to PS3s), let me tell you that the PS3's memory bandwidth is so close to unlimited, that you usually don't have to think about it. At least as long as you move data only on the Element Interconnect Bus, between the 256KB local SRAMs of each CELL core, which is sufficient for most of what I did. It moves up to 200 giga bytes per second, maximum 16 bytes per 2 cycles in and out per core. The DMA engines that do those transfer have their own 1024bit (!) read/write port into the SRAM, so they burst 128 bytes per cycle into the SRAM, and don't have to steel many RAM cycles. The wikidedia article has more details.

In my experience, you can usually come pretty close to the 200 GFLOP/s of the Cell-CPU. When relying on C-Compiler with SIMD intrinsics, you usually manage 100 GPFOP/s for algorithms that have as many read/write opcodes as arithmetic opcodes. Smaller problems can mostly be handled on registers only (per CPU we have 128 16-byte registers!) and will run even faster.

Also note that many algorithms nowadays are not bandwidth but memory latency limited. Having the Cell's per-core DMA engines do background transfers to large local S-RAMs, mostly eliminates these latency problems and is much cleaner than relying on CPU caches guessing what parts of RAM to prefetch next. BTW these are user-space DMA engines that undergo page translation and are fully compatible to unix vm concepts. Still programming directly accesses DMA registers and doesn't need any kernel calls.

I can't wait for Sony to sue Gitbrew, and then a few days later all Sony assembly lines suddenly spinning up and down uncontrollably to the tune of "this is a triumph" or whatever other tune the hackers fancy...

Now that depends, can you use this firmware to pirate games? If so, then they should sue, if not, then it's not worth their time. and if someone hacks their factory? Have him arrested, as he's committed a crime. Seriously, why do so many slashdotters love criminals?

Apparently, Geoff Levand was one of the people behind this release [1]. Geoff Levand is the programmer who worked for Sony supporting OtherOS and made the ill-fated and oft-quoted promise that Sony would never ever remove OtherOS from fat PS3s. [2] Looks like Geoff just kicked his former employer in the nuts. Go Geoff!

I just what to know how well XBMC for linux runs on this thing now that full access to the hardware is possible (I don't own a PS3... yet).

The XBMC team has stated numerous times that they aren't interested in supporting XBMC on a hacked platform anymore, but this is different since we might be able to run the vanilla linux version on it (and if any optimization is required for it to run smoothly, maybe it can be done at the OS level - outside of XMBC).

Sadly, that's the way the news works these days, it's not news unless it's sensational news. Well reasoned and accurate statements are cold and boring, who the hell wants to read that? Urmm...personally, I do and I know a lot of people that do. People with the ability to think critically. Which unfortunately is a minority everywhere. Hence, no place is immune from the sensational headlines being needed to garner page hits. *sigh*

I followed and read the path of links all the way to the core announcemen

Well compared to the original OtherOS where you 'only' had 6 SPU's at your disposal, you can use the remaining 2 now for extra power.. a desktop proc is a generic processor which is good enough at a lot of stuff, but isn't great at specific calculations (like scientific calculations).. You have to factor in the current age of the CELL and price, you cannot get a current PC for ultrafast calculations for the same price as you can get a PS3.. If you purely want to run linux as an 'office' OS then you should s